Thread by @gauravsabnis

A #DemonetisationDisaster story I mightve tweeted before. We were on a Neeta bus from Bombay to Pune in Dec 2016. A trip I'd made 100s of times. I had told Rupal how I loved the food vendors who got on the bus in Chembur, Vashi, Lonavala. And bought their product very often.

That time though, with cash in short supply, we had to be selective. In Vashi, dude selling boiled peanuts got on. We bought the peanuts. They were great. But the bus broke down. We had to wait an hour or so until a replacement bus arrived. I started chatting with vendors.

The peanut guy remembered me as the only person on the bus who bought something from him. Most people didn't buy anything. Twas Dec 2016. But Oct 2016, people would have been buying this stuff big time. Not in Dec.

Modi decided to abolish 85% of the nation's currency overnight.

Modi took a surging economy & scuttled it by making the money in people's own pockets, their own hard-earned money, illegal. Suddenly people were treating cash as a commodity.

Indians still don't get how messed up that idea is. To make currency a commodity with scarcity.

But back to the boiled peanuts guy. I chatted with him for a while. Asked him how business was affected by the #Demon. First he did the proforma thing of saying "for the sake of the nation, to defeat black money" etc. But when I started talking, he realized I wasn't a bhakt.

He became forthcoming.

Nothing really damning or insulting about the Indian IT sector's personal crush Modi. But he did talk about his practical troubles. And how he and a few others had it particularly bad because they sold perishable products. Unlike the ones selling Lays.

His point was almost straight out of a business school case study. Revenue vs cost etc.

Everyone's revenue was hit hard & was uncertain cos Modi wanted to win U.P.

Cash sales were down. But the ones selling Lays, Cadbury etc at least had durable inventory. Less headache.

So if you didn't sell enough packets of chips or kurkure today, you could still sell them tomorrow. Or day after. Or week after. Etc.

The ones selling perishable goods had no such flexibility. Boiled peanuts have to be sold the day they are boiled. Or then thrown away.

The Modi-made #DemonetisationDisaster meant that the guy's estimates about the quantity of peanuts that'll be sold in a day, based on previous sales, were off. He'd often end up not selling even a little of it. Other days, he ran out of boiled peanuts to sell.

The Bombay-Pune Volvo crowd is mostly white collar brahmins, the sangh base, which will tell you the sky is green if Modi says so. I heard tech uncles boasting about how they never pay cash etc. So this guy's revenue was hit. But costs did not go down. If anything, they spiked.

So even among the vendors jumping on to buses, he had it worse. Cos the Modi-made #DemonetisationDisaster meant that in one bus, no one would buy anything. In another, some would buy something. It was random. There was no way for him to calculate his inventory needs.

Oh, just remembered, back when I first tweeted this story, a lot of people are like "why doesn't he sell something else then"?

Sigh!

Indian elites really have no idea how the other half lives. You think street vendors have any kind of agency in what they should sell?

Instead of watching Squid Game, talk to a few street vendors in India about their lives.